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So I thought about it a little more... Siphoning Trap seems underappreciated, chills all nearby & deals with all needs for mana and life regen w.r.t. skill/buff costs. LGoH with high attack speed is good for dark delves atm. You also don't need to support all gems at 20/20, or maxed accuracy so long as you aren't crit and can't be blinded & doubly suffer for it, right? And surely the bottom right of the tree does poison at least as well as that minion-passives Occultist... So I made some ~2mil dps Jugg/Champ/Raider/Scions, some with Acro+PA or other nice ways to remove ailments & sustain charges. Then I found Berserker does 3.8mil dps for basically the same setup... with the improved 25% instant heal cries.
Have I missed something again, like the impossible dual totems before?
Mana costs should be fine because the cost is only charged at 1/3 the attack rate, because multistrike.
I've even got the mace correctly in the main hand this time, enabling Leap Slam while only using the claw for dps.

P.S. With ~3k chromes you can get ~5.2mil dps using a Covenant. But this then leads to even more madness, like 6k life VP Jugg Slayer Scions... very close to needing a 1shot to ever die (probably closest since VP nerf). Did you know the LGoH gem is scaled by the 142% damage effectiveness of VS?

1. at some point Sulphite farming starts being a problem. Instance-cheesing Quarry for sulphite yuilds like 1000 per <10 min, but thats not an option for any sane person, also GGG may fix that at some point. I'm just mapping normally so far, and delve when i have full sulphite. But at some point (i think around level 94, pretty sure i'm not grinding past 95 for now) i'll stop caring about leveling and will want to actually test the builds limit in rippy delves.

2. Bug where if you leave instance after opening a "City" node, all other City nodes won't open. Pretty infuriating, because these are hard, but also rewarding (got 5 t12 maps among other things from one Abyss room)

Other than that i'm having a blast (KB wander, get it? ).

Turns out new corruption implicits are pretty OP when your build uses cheap uniques.
Vaaled 10 or so Piscators (1 to 2c each for not completely dogshit rolls), for an easy %pen implicit, making this pretty much BiS outside of better rolls and 10ex+ rare wands

Spoiler:

Was going to upgrade from Thunderfists to horror-crafted Gripped Gloves. Yolo'd one horror essence, got pretty much shitall except chaos res on the gloves. Vaaled my Thunderfists, got casual %as implicit. Will use them for quite a bit longer now i guess.

Nice. Good old Vaal > all this newer Elder shit, get off my lawn, etc.
Also, GGG just took a swing at this LGoH interaction for delves.
And I got the Bers to over 7mil dps with the same crap gear, because Coralito flask. And then a new Occultist to over 5mil dps with the same cheap gear (still need to refine the 2 curse links & ES utilisation). Can't quite decide which char to role, but it's nearly time to corrode everything.

Damage mitigation is going to eventually get outscaled, whereas damage prevention should always work - accuracy of mobs is also capped because it is tied to level (at least thats what i assume)

My endgame delve plan at the moment is evasion-capped dodge-capped Pathfinder using freeze proliferation to freeze rares.
Going to be a while though till i respec from Deadeye, because Deadeye is just so much more raw dps

Includes "Fixed a bug where Melee skills could not deal damage to a target if you were standing directly on top of the target.". It's like it's almost ready to be played. Though the big omission is a response to all the reddit bitching about sulphite supply/cost.
Also a group got past delve level 1500 already, when devs assessed players couldn't and Chris said he doubled that limit because he erred on the side of caution.

Also a group got past delve level 1500 already, when devs assessed players couldn't and Chris said he doubled that limit because he erred on the side of caution.

Chris also said that very few players would get their hands on Uber Elder loot, so thats a cheap bait.

If you can hard CC mobs (budget option being freezing all the things) the only thing limiting your progress is the sulphite grind.

Another option is apparently a character that is immune to damage, which is reliably doable now given some budget, as showcased by havoc.

You go CI
You have all incoming phys damage converted to elemental via "% phys damage taken as <element>" which you can get in plenty of places now
You then get 100% elemental resistances via flasks and purity auras.

Grr, PoB is bugged for correctly applying just Vaal Blight while you have Spreading Rot jewels, and GGG devs still haven't confirmed if Withering Touch applies the same secondary effect as Wither or if Withered can also stack on the same target.

Muh 10mil chaos deeeps theorycrafting

Also, ever hunting for ideas to use/sustain a ~2k ES pool over a ~5k life one.

Edit: turns out it's the same named Withered effect ingame since 3.4.0 and the official wiki's datamining bot has a bug for gem text changes...

And we have 3.4.2, with a few extra tweaks, and it broke Curse on Hit heralds, and the Scourge Arrow change caused crashing...
And possibly most terrifying is "Fixed an issue where some players were unable to find certain chests in their mine." which some fear means a character-ID-seeded-RNG bug, possibly the absolute worst for enjoying RPGs. Wi-flagged anyone?
Also resist prefix crafting went legacy mid-league.

But we have a Sulphite dev explanation. Includes a mid-week merge of progress, so multi-character delvers may need to do some content before it.

Holy shit, i've for the first time made a tweak to an established build thats
a) actually new/not widely used before
b) adds to the build beyond "5% more PoB dps"
c) actually works, so not a PoB-only creation

1. have QotF, use double evasion flasks (Jade + Stibnite) to scale it - QOTF gives movement speed per evasion rating
2. have herald of ice + curse on hit + assassins mark to realiably curse all the things with assassins mark. Assmark does several things, but the most important one is 25 mana gained on kill which is a large part of your mana sustain
3. Use Wrath aura and abyss jewels to get large amounts of added flat elemental damage, which you then can scale with elemental damage rolls on gear.

You then normally use Kinetic Blast in a 4L which is enough to clear maps, and get a Barrage 6L going to have single target.

OK, now Delve progression is all about killing packs of normal mobs. Single target dps setup is actually pretty useless there, whereas on your clear skill you want as much dps as possible.

Logical tweak to the build? Use KB in a 6L, easy. Well... with 72-75% mana reserved (Wrath + Herald of Ice) and 80+ mana cost per attack not so easy. To comfortably spam KB you need 4 points worth of mana nodes on the tree and you'll still run into issues when there are less mobs around, nevermind actual no regen mods.

Also: having a mediocre hp pool (5.8-6k, maybe 6.5k possible) with zero mitigation is not optimal. While my plan (in true softcore fashion) is to freeze everything and rely on evasion/blind/dodge, i for sure would like to delay the moment where any hit will oneshot me for as much as possible.

Solution: use KB with Blood Magic, drop all mana nodes on tree, shoehorn an additional Enfeeble + Blasphemy setup on mana for an additional defense layer that synergizes beautifully with stacked evasion.
Enfeeble is 30% less damage taken from normal mobs, and also significantly reduces mobs accuracy. Evasion is only capped at 95% (as opposed to for example 75% with attack dodge), so dont need to worry about hitting the cap there!

Two issues that need solving:

1. Mana reservation is actually 50% (wrath) + 35% (Enfeeble/Blasphemy) + 25% (HoI) = 110%. This is solved by either using two level 3 Enlightens and spending 3 points on the tree to travel to a single 4% Aura reservation node or by using two level 3 and one level 4 Enlighten
2. Dual-Curse. Solved by either traveling 5 points on the tree towards Witch dual-curse, or by getting a corrupted implicit on an amulet.

Enlighten 4 has a pretty nasty 5ex+ pricetag, also coloring 3b for this is somewhat a pain on my gear so for now i'm grabbing an aura reservation node.

I could snag a not completely terrible +1 curse rare amulet though, with crit chance, some life and a much needed strength roll, so i'm rolling with that.

Plenty of shit to improve and options available now, whereas before i was pretty much hitting the ceiling of the build's potential.
Can explore curse on hit options as glove corruption/ring roll. Curse also doesnt have to necessary be AssMark if i manage to get power charge generation somewhere else (for example one of wand corruption implicits is chance to gain power charge on crit). Ele Weakness is for sure more deeps

TL;DR: fast attacking skill, stack flat added ele damage, use BM for sustain. It's Ele Buzzsaw all over again
RIP Reduced mana gem for auras, so many chromes sunk into Alpha's Howls pre Vorici bench.
These days there's also The Covenant as an option if you leave a few % unreserved for support skills, or just link them to BM. And a couple of meh dps weapons that also link/grant attacks BM. But yeah it's more original for a bow/wand build.

Cruise control on with a staff guardian (fire). 3k dps with -flame res curse as aura. Then got one hit by Kitava. (or technically i managed to get hit by two hits that came simultaneously, i was in middle and they struck left and right of me).

Its not on the level of Elemental hit or whatever is the flavour of the month build, but its suprisingly fun.
Still have to 6 link with lightning pen and get my uber lab for more defence (block node).

turns out having 20 spectral wolves acting as a meatshield keeps you alive through almost anything.

dmg is allright, minions lag behind during map clear because smite kills faster. On bosses they double your dps.
The Gear i bought cost me maybe a total of 4 ex. Also you really need the boot enchant or you run out of mana way to fast.

Cruise control on with a staff guardian (fire). 3k dps with -flame res curse as aura. Then got one hit by Kitava. (or technically i managed to get hit by two hits that came simultaneously, i was in middle and they struck left and right of me).

If you mean you were playing hardcore as a newbie and got killed by Kitava, that's a damned fine first attempt and not at all unlikely. The red-on-red (act 10) fight's harder than a bunch of the first map tiers.

What movement skills, flasks and other defences did you start to have? Leap Slam + Fortify (+ Faster Attacks) can make a world of difference.

Cruise control on with a staff guardian (fire). 3k dps with -flame res curse as aura. Then got one hit by Kitava. (or technically i managed to get hit by two hits that came simultaneously, i was in middle and they struck left and right of me).

If you mean you were playing hardcore as a newbie and got killed by Kitava, that's a damned fine first attempt and not at all unlikely. The red-on-red (act 10) fight's harder than a bunch of the first map tiers.

What movement skills, flasks and other defences did you start to have? Leap Slam + Fortify (+ Faster Attacks) can make a world of difference.

Well i have made it to act 7 before so i kinda know what Kitava does, but im not used with melee while doing it.
Was using speed flask, and the hallow ground one for dmg and 2 health/1mana and had +25% move speed boots. it dint matter this time sine i was instad. Usually uses a Stibnite flask instead of the hallowed ground one (dont know if it works on end game bosses thought).